Wong also confirmed a hoary piece of early Reddit history: That
Sears once successfully persuaded Reddit to remove a link mocking
the company:

With the exceptions of a handful of incidents in very early years
(e.g. Sears), none of reddit’s owners or investors have ever
bothered to exercise influence over reddit’s operations or
editorial decisions. Even reddit’s servers are controlled via an
AWS account not shared with any other entity, only reddit
administrators have access to it. Control of this account was
also never transferred to or shared with Condé Nast during the
period when they were owners of reddit.

reddit is not preparing to sell or do an IPO. We value our
independence more than money, and the company was already
acquired once before (by Condé Nast) and survived due to a rare
instance of corporate benevolence/indifference. Other companies
who sell themselves usually don’t end up so lucky, while going
public (IPO) means having to answer to short-term shareholders
and irrational market pressures. We don’t want to risk either of
those.

Condé Nast / Advance also never wanted to sell reddit, and
rejected offers to buy the site, instead electing to spin it out
into an independent entity and take a lessened ownership position
specifically because they felt that a standalone reddit would be
far more successful, culturally significant, and (one day)
profitable.